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Centralization in Hawaii: Retrospect and Prospect1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 September 2013

Norman Meller
Norman Meller
Affiliation:
University of Hawaii
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Extract

The Hawaiian Islands, in Mark Twain's words “the loveliest fleet of Islands that lies anchored in any ocean,” offer more than a vista of sub-tropical splendor to the student of government. Hawaii presents also an extreme of centralized administration probably unequaled in any state on the mainland. The century prior to annexation by the United States saw the major islands of the Hawaiian archipelago come under the jurisdiction of a single government which rapidly underwent a metamorphosis from stone-age, native absolutism, through restricted constitutional monarchy, to the status of independent republic. “Adjustment rather than reorganization defines the change in government necessary when Hawaii entered the Union as a Territory.” Allowed by Congress almost all the powers of a state, and wide discretion in erecting its own local structure, the Territory chose to continue the concentrated administration which had characterized government throughout the century of independent rule. Only within the last few years has this centralization been shaken by the introduction of challenging centrifugal forces. Today, Hawaii affords the prospect of an ocean-girt test tube in which can be observed the interplay of these new formative forces with the old causative factors of centripetal tendency; the end product may be a decentralized administration more on the model of the mainland.

Type
Research Article
Information
American Political Science Review , Volume 52 , Issue 1 , March 1958 , pp. 98 - 107
Copyright
Copyright © American Political Science Association 1958

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References

2 Hawaii, Annual Report of the Governor of Hawaii to the Secretary of the Interior, 1926 (Washington: G.P.O., 1926), p. 2Google Scholar.

3 To the south, the Island of Hawaii, comprising the County of Hawaii; then the cluster of Maui, Molokai and Lanai, composing the County of Maui; the Island of Oahu, which accounts for practically the whole of the City and County of Honolulu; and, to the north, the County of Kauai, consisting of the Islands of Kauai and Niihiau.

4 Hawaiian Organic Act, sec. 56. The history of the Act's passage through Congress indicates that the Senate advocated compelling the Territory to provide local government while the House of Representatives concurred with the Commission which drafted the bill in making it permissive. Congressional Record, 56th Cong., 1st Sess. (1900), Vol. 33, Part 5, p. 4458Google Scholar.

5 The City and County of Honolulu dates from a 1907 act converting the County of Oahu created in 1905.

6 Technically there is a fourth county, the County of Kalawao, comprising the Hansen's Disease Settlement located on a peninsula on the Island of Molokai. The territorial board of health actually governs this area. For other minor local units of government see U. S. Bureau of the Census, Local Government Structure in the United States, State and Local Government Special Studies No. 34 (Washington, 1954), p. 87Google Scholar.

7 See Wallace's, Schuyler C. typology of control in his State Administrative Supervision over Cities in the United States (New York, 1928), pp. 39–59Google Scholar. All Wallace's forms of administrative control, plus a few indigenous to the Islands, are to be found in Hawaii.

8 The congregations of the various churches did not govern their own affairs. Each was in subordination to the missionary who controlled the activities of the churches in his district within the course cut by the annual General Meeting of the Hawaiian Mission in which only the missionaries participated.

9 As used in Hawaii, and in this paper, “Hawaiian” refers ethnically to the original Polynesian inhabitants of Hawaii and their descendants, and includes all part-Hawaiians.

10 “Haole,” a word unknown to any standard English dictionary, is a common component of the Islander's lexicon. Originally it probably meant “foreigner” but it has long since assumed overtones of status. It means “the whites of North-European complexion, most of whom have come from the mainland United States.” Littler, Robert M. C., The Governance of Hawaii (Stanford, 1929), p. 65Google Scholar. Until recently even official publications distinguished the “haole” from persons of Portuguese ancestry

11 Littler, op. cit., p. 222.

12 Midkiff, Frank E., “The Economic Determinants of Education in Hawaii” (unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Graduate School, Yale University, 1935), p. 132Google Scholar.

13 Meanwhile, the Republican governor submitted to the 1955 Legislature recommendations for an integrated territorial police force and for a Territory-wide motor vehicle registration system in place of the locally conducted arrangements now prevailing. These may be taken as highlighting the difference in position of the two parties on home rule as of 1945.

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